With its conventions of undercover espionage, deception, and life-and-death battles, Hanna Blade is an oddly singular psychological thriller that goes way beyond the superficial in its action. It is a complicated tale of espionage, betrayal and personal identity which is intertwined with the dramatic journey of Hanna Blade, a high-end operative whose existence is not only a consequence of the missions that she goes on, but also the mental price of living in a secret-world. Her tale reinvents the idea of what modern day thrillers can be by making them balance both the adrenaline-rush scenes and the emotional ones, internalized conflict, and a hound to find the truth, which is hidden behind the curtain of manipulations.
In Hanna Blade thriller is not glamorous or glorified. Rather it is a choking net of surveillance, undercover missions and grey morality. Hanna is carried through missions that compel her to be two steps ahead of the enemies she can see and ten steps ahead of the enemies she cannot. Every operation reveals the harsh reality of her life: alliances break instantly, information is as good as the provider of this information, and one wrong move can make one a prey of the hunter. This low-brow, unvarnished representation of espionage preconditions the whole story, making it more clearly grounded in realism which increases the level of danger in each scene.
However, the best thing about the novel is how it manages betrayal. The novel shows that the most dangerous things Hanna deals with are not necessarily the criminals, syndicates, and foreign agents that she is dispatched to deal with. Rather, they are usually internal to her agency- an institution which she has devoted her life to. Everything that she believed turns out to be false when Hanna finds out that the organization that she trusted has been infiltrated. The individuals pulling the strings are not her far-off enemies but the ones who had close relationships with her in her past.
Betrayal is not just a plot device, but a heart wound, which is reopened each time she discovers another lie.
It is this struggle of identity that makes Hanna Blade stand out among the traditional thrillers. The problem of Hanna is not how to complete the missions, kill the threats but how to restore the fragmented parts of her that have been broken off over years of conditioning. The battleground of the story is her mind the most critical. She needs to sort out what she thinks and what has been introduced to her by being manipulated. She has to deal with the haunting of her old world and the dark side of her present.
Hanna reveals a psychological impact of secrecy life through her. Each of the betrayals renders her stronger and more conscious of her loss. Each revelation brings her even cheaper to the truth and brings her even more dangerously nearby. The strength that she possesses turns into the emotional heart of the story, and she is no longer a competent op agent but a representation of rebellion against the systems that attempted to subdue her.
Hanna Blade is a psychological thriller that breaks all the rules, as this book does not differentiate between action and emotion, espionage and identity. It gives us a heroine, as curious of her soul as she is deadly. Readers do not just get pulled along in her missions but in her change. In a genre in which the excitement is typically created by outward threat, Hanna Blade goes a genre step further and creates cog-evoking as well as heart-throbbing stories.
